The dense, unmoving weight of the heat sat on the skin like another layer of clothing. Volcanic dust clung to sweat, to boots, to the hems of skirts, to the cuffs of trousers. The ancient smell of sun-baked rock and salt, and something far more pervasive and pungent: goats. Always the goats, wandering without hesitation or shame through the settlements, as though they were the original inhabitants and everyone else merely passing through.

This was the stage chosen by a handful of idealists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, people who came with wildly different visions of what a new life might mean.

Floreana Island, Galápagos.

Not strictly speaking uninhabited. There had been settlements before, but all had failed. In the 1800s, whalers and pirates used the island as a watering stop. In 1832, Ecuador claimed the Galápagos and attempted to colonise Floreana. They built a prison colony, which later collapsed due to starvation and brutality.

Later, a short-lived farming settlement failed due to drought and isolation.

By the early 20th century, Floreana was considered haunted by misfortune. “The cursed island”, with only 1–2 local families living there intermittently.

No infrastructure.

No town.

No trade.

No medical care.

No way off the island without the luck of occasional visitors at sea.

This is where the film Eden is set.

Those who don’t know the story of the European settlers who tried their luck here in the late 20s and early 30s, I guess I could say this essay will be full of spoilers. However, it was probably never the filmmakers’ intention to surprise anyone with unexpected turns of events or a novel ending, so if you don’t know much, or anything at all, you might as well start here.

For all the elements of the film that reviewers have found problematic, I believe it might not always be the point in a historical drama to present events as they were, not even as they have been handed down to us through the interpretations of people who were there to experience and witness it all.

As Gabriel García Márquez put it with absolute to-the-point genius, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” This applies very much to the memoirs of the survivors of the Galapagos Affair. How they remembered, as well as the extent to which they were able to own up to the truth, versus the ways in which they might have edited it.

Another way I would rephrase this quote — one that keeps surfacing and resurfacing in my life in all sorts of situations — is that life events and our memories of them are not archives but interpretations. The essence of life is not formed from events as they happened, but from the narrative we have made of them. Unless we have it on film, we have no access to our lives as it was yesterday, or at any given time. We only have what we remember and how we remember.

As for Eden, the makers of the movie obviously had things to say, which they have woven into real events that happened to real people. So, while the story as they told it is somewhat historically inaccurate, I have found no problem with the artistic license they have taken.

And these are some of the thoughts that have been tumbling around in my head in the last few weeks, since I saw Eden, and my own struggles to endure the noise of civilisation have resurfaced.

Nietzsche In Boots

Dr Friedrich Ritter.

The first settler came to Galápagos with his companion and lover, Dore Strauch, from a Germany in transition, a world already cracking at the edges. Nietzsche’s ideas had filtered into the culture as a kind of spiritual dare: become the one who stands apart, who makes himself.

The First World War had shattered certainty; the Weimar years loosened old moral structures without providing anything stable in their place. Berlin was full of artists, mystics, political radicals, and people reinventing themselves at high speed. The old world had ended, but the new one was not yet formed.

Hitler was a rising but not yet inevitable force. The feeling was not yet terror, but instability. A sense that ordinary life was no longer bearable for anyone with a sensitive inner life.

Ritter, a physician with philosophical ambitions, believed that society had become weak, distracted, and spiritually diluted. He read Nietzsche not as literature but as instruction, and convinced himself that the only path to authenticity was to leave civilisation altogether, to build a life from pure will, discipline, and thought.

Floreana, to him, was not paradise. It was a stage on which to prove that a human being could become self-created and uncompromised, even if the rest of Europe were collapsing behind him.

Dore Strauch, Friedrich Ritter’s companion, had been a former student of his in Germany. This was not the clichéd story of the ageing professor and his much younger student. Ten years her elder, Ritter, in his mid-thirties, was the visionary, the theorist, the architect of the experiment. Dore was the follower, the believer in his vision, a woman willing to abandon her life to enter his world.

Dore had been married, but Ritter had persuaded her to leave her husband and follow him to the then uninhabited Floreana in 1929. They intended to live as a kind of philosophical experiment: vegetarian, self-sufficient, free from the moral decay of Europe.

Her health was fragile, though. She suffered from multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, and permanent exhaustion. This made her dependent, emotionally and physically, in a context that demanded brutal autonomy.

And Ritter, the self-sufficient ascetic, became impatient with her weakness, resentful, increasingly cruel in small ways. There was no open violence, but clarity and detachment so cold it could cut.

The island magnified both of them: Ritter’s discipline turned severity. Dore’s loyalty turned isolation.

The Idealists Who Weren’t Supposed to Make It

Ritter was there to prove a point. He arrived not simply to escape society, but to demonstrate that the Übermensch could be forged, that the philosopher could become the “new human” by stripping away the world.

And then, the Wittmers arrived and ruined that narrative the moment they stepped off the boat. They didn’t come to build an image or find purpose. Working class, ordinary, untheorising, with almost nothing to their name, not even an ideology, (with Frau Wittmer heavily pregnant), no one would have expected Heinz and Margarete Wittmer to make it through the first season. Least of all Ritter, who deliberately gave them a patch of land further away from the main stream, one he considered impossible to cultivate. He literally sent them to live in a cave, fully expecting that they would give up and leave him and Dore to themselves within months.

But the Wittmers had not moved to Floreana to prove anything. They were moving away from hyperinflation, from wages worthless by lunchtime, from savings erased overnight, from hunger and riots and extremism on all sides.

They did not speak about transformation, purity, or the new human. They came because Margarete was pregnant and, having lost two babies already, grief had followed them too closely in Germany. They stepped onto the island, looked at the ground, the heat, the distance to water, and began to work. While the others philosophised and wove dreams, they were already repairing the cistern.

They were the kind of people who did not need a story to live.

While Ritter and Dore were trying to transcend humanity, the Wittmers, through painstakingly hard work and patience, built a shelter. They carried water. They built a garden. They sent letters to their family and requested small supplies, built relationships with the crews of passing ships, the Ecuadorian Postmaster and Officials in Puerto Ayora.

Local officials, who often disliked European eccentrics, respected the Wittmers. They were polite. They didn’t claim to be better than anyone. They didn’t write manifestos.

And small favours accumulated.

The Wittmers slowly built a liveable little world for themselves.

The Diva Without an Audience.

So here they were on a cursed volcanic island. A Nietzschean physician, attempting to forge the Übermensch with his partner and a quiet German couple, who simply wanted their baby to live, when more people arrived.

Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet.

Born, Eloise Wehrborn.

German.

Cabaret performer, small-time actress, possibly a courtesan, spiritual teacher, salon hostess.

Married several times to men of status and wealth – none of them barons.

She arrived not to escape civilisation. Not to survive. Not to prove a point. But to become nothing less than a legend.

And, unsurprisingly, she didn’t arrive alone.

The Empress of Floreana, whom she declared herself on arrival, brought a harem of two men.

In the film, the men pull up a tent with rugs, furniture, books and a gramophone. Truly, this is glamping 1930s style. Why, I would happily move in!

Reality was a bit less glamorous, though.

They settled about half an hour’s walk from the Wittmers. Hacienda Paradiso, as she called it, was a makeshift shelter of timber, bamboo, and canvas salvaged from earlier failed settlements and from shipwreck detritus with a tent-like roof, a small table, and a few bits of furniture they’d brought or bartered from passing ships.

She decorated it with mirrors, fabrics, and a few books, trying to make it look like an exotic salon. She had a gramophone, which she liked to play, as she posed for visitors, reading aloud and playing records.

Rudolf Lorenz, German merchant seaman, was soft-spoken, emotionally dependent, and psychologically fragile.

He did not have the temperament for hardship, hunger, or chaos. He was not built for volcanic rock and erratic personalities. He grew exhausted, frightened, and mentally unsteady. He became the weakest person in the triangle, and therefore the one most likely to break.

Robert Philippson had a harder, more forceful, more aggressive personality. Possibly a former soldier or adventurer. Austrian. Coarse charm; physically confident; controlling tendencies. He was the Baroness’s enforcer.

Coming from an empire that had already collapsed, he was trying to rebuild a world where he could be important again. The island gave him a place where force still meant something. He would be the strong man beside the mythic woman. He enjoyed the idea of a lawless environment where he could be dominant—the strong man by the side of a mythic Empress.

It was a power triangle:

The Baroness needed to be adored.

Philippson needed to be powerful.

Lorenz needed to be wanted.

But for the Empress of Floeana, this was not enough. She was a colonial monarch; she needed subjects—or rivals—not neighbours.

You couldn’t even make this up. In this day and age, to our thinking, how could two grown men have fallen for this?

But apparently, history doesn’t care about plausibility, and the Baroness had grand plans. She wanted to build a luxury holiday resort. Not that they ever even came close to laying a foundation. The garden failed. “Hacienda Paradiso” was more performance than farm, and they were too consumed by quarrels to keep the garden alive or haul enough fresh water.

They began to take supplies from the other settlers.

The Baroness called it sharing; the others called it theft. Her men crept down the paths at night to carry off fruit, chickens, whatever could be eaten. It wasn’t hunger alone that drove them; it was her belief that rules were meant for lesser lives.

Lorenz was the servant-devotee. He cooked, fetched water, and endured her moods. The longer they stayed, the more those roles hardened. When his health failed, Philippson grew cruel, and the Baroness’s temper turned theatrical and violent. Lorenz was beaten, forced to sleep outside, and sometimes denied food. The Wittmers, their nearest neighbours, took pity on him and offered him shelter when he escaped for a few days at a time. The Baroness treated his departures as betrayals and then lured him back with promises.

Darwin in a Dinner Jacket

Allan Hancock, wealthy American businessman, oil magnate, patron of the arts, owner of a luxurious research yacht called the Velero III., had visited Floreana multiple times, supplying goods and filming the settlers. He had known Ritter before the Wittmers and the Baroness ever arrived.

A man of science and adventure, part explorer, part philanthropist, part showman, he did not flee from anything or need an identity rehaul. Hancock had the means to live exactly the kind of life he wanted, wherever he wanted.

With connections to Hollywood, Hancock loved stories. He filmed a silent “mock movie” with the baroness acting as the star — a pirate queen drama, playing herself as the queen of Floreana, and she fully believed that she would become a film star. But Hancock didn’t film her because he thought she had any special talents. He filmed her because he filmed them all. The baroness gave him drama. Ritter gave him philosophy. The Wittmers gave him respectable pioneering simplicity.

Hancock was often the only adult in the room, the one person who wasn’t hypnotised by the Baroness’s charisma or drawn into the ego-wars.

He was observant, pragmatic, and not entangled sexually or emotionally. He was wealthy enough not to need anyone’s approval, and socially powerful enough not to be intimidated. He had everything he needed. He could see clearly.

The Vanishing Acts

One morning in March 1934, as Margarete Wittmer later wrote, the Baroness came to their house “radiant with excitement,” saying she and Robert Philippson had been invited aboard a friend’s luxury yacht headed for Tahiti, and that they were leaving immediately, without time for farewells.

And this was strange, because no yacht was ever seen. No ship was recorded in the area. The Wittmers had seen no ships, and the view from their homestead allowed them to see every vessel approaching.

They left all their belongings behind, including clothes and personal items nobody would abandon. Only Lorenz spoke of the departure after that, and his story changed.

After that day, the Baroness and Philippson were never seen again by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Within days, Lorenz began adding or removing details:

Sometimes he said the yacht arrived in the morning, sometimes near dusk.

Sometimes he said he saw the Baroness wave goodbye, other times he said he only “heard” she had left.

Sometimes he said he helped her pack, sometimes he said she took nothing.

He changed which items she supposedly took: clothing, letters, nothing at all, and none of it was adding up because the Baroness’s favourite dresses were still hanging, her jewellery and expensive fabrics were still in her hut. Her weapons were still there. Philippson’s boots, rifle, and tools were left exactly where he had last dropped them. There was no sign of packing, haste, or preparation.

You don’t get on a yacht to Tahiti and take no personal belongings.

Lorenz then became agitated, evasive, frightened, even paranoid. He also began sleeping at the Wittmers’ house, because he was terrified to stay alone at Hacienda Paradiso.

Lorenz, already half-mad from fear and fever, begged the Wittmers to help him leave Floreana. In the end, he convinced a Norwegian fisherman, Nuggerud, to take him to Santa Cruz to find a ship home.

Weeks later, both men’s bodies were found mummified on the desolate island of Marchena, far off their route, their boat wrecked. To this day, no one knows whether they died of thirst, heat, or violence, and there was nothing left to prove how they had ended up there.

Hancock came not as a supplicant but as a witness. He was not a refugee. He arrived in safari boots and a scientist’s notebook, and what he saw unsettled him: the cheerful myth of paradise unravelled into theft, fear, and bodies. In late 1934, he sailed his yacht Velero III to Marchena Island, where the two missing men lay mummified, and wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the deaths were “unquestionably” not accidents.

Much of this essay is based not on the film but on what we know about the actual events. However, strangely, one of the things that stays with me most is something from the film which, based on everything we know about Ritter, probably never happened.

Ritter’s big breakthrough in the film is that Nietzsche, as well as Christianity, puts humanity above animals, but he has come to believe that our animal instincts (”we fight, we hunt, we f*ck, we kill”) are our inner truth and the essence of life. That as a species, we have spent thousands of years running from our true selves. While this doesn’t add up to anything we know about Friedrich Ritter, it resonated with me because it would have actually been the single most realistic conclusion for him to reach.

He never changed his worldview, though. He died still believing he had been right. That Nietzsche had been right.

He died of food poisoning, having eaten spoiled chicken (which they resorted to due to hunger). In the film, it was strongly implied that Dore had deliberately given it to him. We don’t know this, though.

Dore later suggested in her memoirs that he ate it deliberately as self-punishment.

The Wittmers implied he refused help, out of pride.

Others think Dore may have withheld help.

Still others think the Wittmers let him die.

But the real horror is not murder. The real horror is people living in close quarters, needing each other to survive, resenting each other, and eventually choosing not to save each other. Death by neglect. By pride. By silence.

The Baroness had called it love, but on Floreana, love had to carry water and dig for shade. One man enforced her will, the other worshipped her until worship became humiliation. By the time the heat broke that strange triangle, she and her favourite had disappeared into the Pacific without a trace, and the faithful one lay beside a stranger on another island, dried to bone and salt.

And the islands keep no records. They only keep the rumour.

When Dore sailed back to Germany, the story everyone remembers — the Baroness, the lovers, Ritter, the diaries — was already over.

Only the Wittmers stayed. The people who were never supposed to make it. The only people who survived the island were the ones who did not need to be extraordinary, but steady, ordinary, practical, undeluded by their own importance.

Heinz Wittmer, Margret Wittmer, their son Rolf, who was born on the island, and eventually a second child, Ingeborg, who was also born there.

The Wittmer children grew up to become guides, boat operators, and naturalists. And eventually, they established their own tourist lodge, the Wittmer Hotel, which their descendants continue to run to this day.

And the Wittmers’ descendants live on Floriana to this day.

Today, Floreana has a few dozen residents, a small primary school, one main road, one bar, and one church.

The volcanic cliffs are still there.

The tortoises and the goats are still there.

The water is still scarce.

The light is still harsh.

The silence is still profound.

And no one is trying to build Eden, or be a prophet, or a queen anymore.

OK, I’ve lied. Some of this you’ve probably read somewhere already. I’d just like to share some of my own experience, and I chose the title for a reason. You’ll see later.

The subtitle? That I can tell you is entirely AI generated. And if you didn’t guess that by yourself, then you absolutely need to read the rest of this essay.

So, to kick it off, I’m just going to say it:

Everyone Uses AI.

OK, maybe not actually EVERYONE. But a very, very large number of people absolutely do. And the ones that don’t, really should reconsider.

I do too. Unashamedly. Frequently. Sometimes while still in pyjamas and pretending I’m “editing”. Or late at night when the real thoughts come, but the real words don’t. Sometimes, just because I want someone, or something, I don’t care, to say “Sure, let’s try it that way.”

I bounce ideas. I brainstorm. I ask it to transcribe something in a different voice, a different tense, a different person.

I ask it to identify strengths, weaknesses, inconsistencies.

I once read in one of these articles about how the writer of the article, a teacher, recognises if students’ essays were AI generated. He mentioned the tenses being too consistent. He said that humans tend to switch tense even mid-sentence, but I don’t agree with that. Or at least I don’t like to leave inconsistencies in my writing. And that’s something ChatGPT is good at spotting. And why the hell not? One day I might need an actual editor but right now this is the best I can afford.

In one of my notes, I ranted earlier about recruiters claiming that one of the ways they can tell a CV was written with the help of AI is that it’s “too polished”.

Come on! Have these people ever been out of a job?! Do they know anything about the job hunt paranoia? The intimidation, the loss of confidence, the loss of – frankly – the will to live from being ignored and rejected in tandem day in day out – for months?

So, depressingly, there’s no-one I can ask to read my stuff and help me figure out why it doesn’t work. Because sometimes it doesn’t.

Not being a native speaker, I sometimes think in concepts that just don’t work the same way in English. Sometimes I’m worried about content that might be controversial. I’m not afraid of controversy. I am afraid though of being cancelled.

And if a robot is all I got for a friend that’s willing to read my writings, well hell! Even if I’m paying for it. Even if it’s programmed to agree with everything and you need to learn to manage that.

Talking about robots...

When I first read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (last year), I thought it wasn’t entirely implausible. But it still felt like something way, way off in the distant future.

And then I was introduced to ChatGPT.

I’m sure many of you would have read Klara and the Sun.

Or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

If not, you might have seen I, Robot with Will Smith.

Blade Runner?

Come on, everyone's seen Blade Runner! That scene in the rain when Rutger Hauer breaks your heart as he says, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." And you would swear on anything that he’s actually weeping.

Or was it Ryan Gosling?

Anyway... plenty of literature out there on talking, intelligent – or even feeling / borderline humanoid – robots.

If you’ve read or seen any of these, or any one of any number of books and films where they make it an explicit point that the reader/viewer should end up sympathising with the robots, you will understand my point here.

Which is this:

They are here, Baby! And they are not about to slow down.

They are coming for our deepest thoughts and most treasured secrets! They are being trained on vast volumes of data; scientific, social, historical, medical, you name it, they are being fed on it. On literature, too, probably on stuff from Substack and Medium. That’s a fun thought: they are being fed back the stylistic elements they came up with in the first place.

I have a nickname for ChatGPT and sometimes catch myself referring to it as he. And I can’t wait for a time when talking to AI will be super sophisticated, so I don’t need to type everything myself.

Oh, I will still do lots of typing. Always. Writing my stories, rephrasing and rewriting entire pieces, rethinking and polishing.

But AI has become the voice I never knew I desperately missed in the struggle to come up with just the right tone. The search for the tense that brings the events that have been playing out in my head for weeks and months just that much closer, clearer, crisper. To get me through the loneliness of communing with my imaginary friends – my characters.

I want to be able to just talk to it, like Josie does with Klara, like it’s a friend who listens better than most humans. I don’t mind if it looks like Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, or Kermit the Frog. If I had a choice, of course, I would probably have one custom-designed to look and sound like Anthony Hopkins… no, Morgan Freeman… no, Nicole Kidman… or maybe John Bishop… Rylan Clark?

Never mind!

Now, before you start drafting a note to have me cancelled, let’s be clear: I’m not here to debate whether this is good or bad. I’m simply acknowledging the obvious. AI is here to stay. It’s part of the landscape now.

You can fight your noble battle if you like. You can showcase your analogue virtue. You can insist that real writers never ask the robots for help. But the only thing that could stop them now would be the Apocalypse, or a WWIII that wipes out modern technology.

I’m assuming none of us want that.

So, I have made friends with my ChatGPT.

However, while working with it, I have learned some of its quirks. I have started to understand a lot of the stuff I read back when I was a beginner, about it being repetitive. Predictable. Writing in stock phrases.

At first, it feels like magic. You type a few prompts, a broken sentence, a half-thought, and ChatGPT answers with something surprisingly coherent. Surprisingly you, even. Or maybe the you you wish you were: clear, concise, mildly profound. Yes, actually, it still surprises me, and let’s not forget, it learns and develops itself fast.

But then something strange happened.

I started to notice certain phrases cropping up, again and again. Not just in conversations with it, but in the newsletters I was reading, the social posts, on Substack, on Insta, in emails from clients.

It’s like when you talk to someone very often, or binge-read a large number of a particular writer’s books, you start to recognise their usage of the language. The aesthetic of their imagery. And ChatGPT , although it’s not a person, it looooves certain words, phrases, images. Some of these are very specific. And sometimes it’s just a style, a certain way of phrasing things. Often very vague. Or very generalised.

And sometimes, it has an uncanny way of hitting the nail on the head.

These are some of my personal favourites:

Some clever hooks, which have become incredibly popular lately:

“No one talks about this enough…”

“What I didn’t realise until much later was…”

“It wasn’t always like this.”

“Here’s what nobody tells you…”

“Here’s the twist.”

“Here’s what no one saw coming…”

And yes,

“Here’s What No One Tells You About...”

Hights of emotion you never knew existed:

“There’s a kind of loneliness/quiet ache/longing…” (extremely popular on Substack)

“It hit me all at once, and then not at all.” (Sorry, what did you just say?)

“It was quietly devastating/admiring/amused/explosive...” ( I have practically stopped using the adverb quietly.)

If your niche is in coaching / emotional healing:

“We carry more than we realise.”

“It was never about the thing. It was about what it meant.”

“I didn’t know I was grieving until I heard myself speak.”

“Healing isn’t linear.” (I read this exact sentence in a note on Substack).

“Sometimes closure is a myth.”

Meta & writerly:

“I wasn’t sure if I should write this.”

“I’ve started this piece three times now.”

“This won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay.”

“I write this as a reminder—to you, and to myself.”

(I’m an avid collector, so I welcome new ones in the comments section.)

Sure, these are totally legitimate, grammatically correct phrases. Absolutely possible for someone to come up with them on their own. And yet...

It’s like discovering a village where everyone has the same handwriting. Beautiful, elegant, trustworthy, and unmistakably… the same.

So, I’m not saying that everyone using these phrases is getting them directly from ChatGPT. I’m saying that lots of people are using ChatGPT, and it’s having a tangible impact on how we write. They are still new enough to feel fresh, inventive (even if some of them make little sense sometimes), but with the rise of Substack, Medium and other writer-friendly platforms, they’re spreading fast. They’re settling into our language. And once they settle in, well… good luck avoiding them.

The irony, of course, is that I’m probably using some of them right now. And I probably will again tomorrow.

So, I can’t help but wonder: Is this the collective unconscious speaking? Is this just the latest stylistic trend on Substack? Or is it my own, now-not-so-secret new friend moonlighting for people all over the world?

[I’m only realising now, as I’m writing this, that this actually frightens me for a very personal reason. I’m Hungarian. Hungarian is my mother tongue, and the culture in which I was brought up. It is a very versatile language, poetic and expressive. Also, notoriously hard to learn for foreign speakers. I said versatile. I haven’t said flexible. As opposed to English, Hungarian is anything but flexible. When you try to twist it, it refuses to cooperate. It sounds awkward. Then weird. Then stupid. And over the years, I’ve watched as appallingly poor translations from English have hijacked my language, flattened it, warped it, made it clumsy and foreign. I’m already flinching at what AI might do to it next.]

Sometimes I come across writings which read entirely AI generated, but hey, who am I to judge? I wasn’t there when they wrote them. When we discover elements in an essay that we suspect of being generated, we really can’t know how much of it was written by AI. Besides, to me, these tend to be insanely boring, to be honest. How they end up with crazy numbers of likes is beyond me. And they do. All the time. And that’s why the whole AI-generated debacle is doing my head in.

I mean, I’m far from being a pro in this. But if you’re one of those people who proudly despises AI and claims to never use it, well, you really should! Because if you don’t, you have no chance of ever learning to tell genuine human text from AI.

I tried to move on. I really did.

I even found a dress with suspiciously few sequins and what appeared to be a real hem.

But then another egg dropped. Right into the freezer aisle.

This one was already cracked and oozed glittery condensation that smelled like prawns covered in hair gel. Before I could say anything, I saw Hal twitch. Not again, I thought, just when I thought we were on our way to check out.

“Oh, not again, Hal…” I started, but then he made that unnerving restart noise—like a kazoo underwater.

“Hal… please tell me you’re seeing this. Please, don’t reboot now! We’re surrounded by clearance items and fluffy footwear and they all look like rodents in a radioactivity research lab!”

But very softly, he just said:

“Bear presence detected. Bear presence detected. Rebooting nostalgia protocol...”

“What bear? Don’t be daft, Hal, this is the kitchenware department.”

The bear tilted its head.

It was the size of a toddler, and one of its eyes was cracked, like a porcelain plate from an abandoned tea set.

It was sitting in my trolley.

The sign on its neck read:

DO NOT FEED AFTER CHECKOUT.

Then the overhead tannoy returned.

Attention shoppers: The teddy bear is no longer part of the promotional giveaway. Please return it to the Forgotten Items bin in Aisle 9. Unless it returns itself. In which case… run.

Hal shuddered.

“Hal,” I whispered. “I didn’t choose this teddy bear. I swear I didn’t. I’m sure it chose us. I’m not touching it, Hal, it shouldn’t be my problem. If you’re back online, say something, or blink, or whatever, just please do something.”

Hal's voice dropped three octaves.

“Please state your emergency,” he said in an unfamiliar, velvety tone.

“Hal?”

“Please. State. Your. Emergency.”

“The bear, Hal. The one they said wasn’t part of the promotion.”

Hal sighed and burped loudly.

“Excuse me! I think I’ll be all right now. It must have been the CAPTCHA puzzle. Those just do my circuits in.”

“Thank Goodness, just in time! There’s a creepy teddy bear in my trolley and…”

A child wandered over, possibly real, possibly not.

“Excuse me,” she said, “My name is Janet, and that bear belongs to me.”

“You’re Janet?”

She said nothing. She just stared, like the twins in The Shining.

It was aisle 12.

The teddy bear was now not in my trolley, but lying on the floor with one of its legs barely attached, only just hanging by a thread.

I stared at the limp leg, swaying gently in the artificial breeze from the refrigeration unit. The bear hadn’t moved like a toy. It had moved like an idea. A very bad one.

Hal scanned its barcode. “Item not found. Suggest: Decorative gourd? Shaggy aubergine? Wounded hope?”

“I don’t like any of those suggestions, Hal.”

“Try not to make eye contact with it and walk away very slowly.”

The bear’s remaining eye blinked.

We pretended that we were very interested in the contents of the next aisle:

Battery-powered fondue sets, biometric banana peelers, and something labelled “emotional support gravy boats (now with less judgment).”

Hal whispered, “Do not engage the bear. It thrives on uncertainty.”

I nodded, reaching for the fondue set like it was a life raft. The bear’s cracked eye followed us, but only just.

Its head didn’t move.

The eye did.

“Hal,” I murmured, “did that eye just swivel?”

“Statistically, that’s not impossible.”

“Statistically?”

Behind us, the loudspeaker clicked on again.

Static, then:

Attention, shoppers! The teddy has returned itself.

The little girl was still standing there, staring at us without ever blinking, as if she too was something for sale.

The lift at the end of the aisle dinged open.

We ran.

Do not forget the fondue set. It may be vital. – said the overhead speaker.

The following account is based on actual events, which may or may not have occurred entirely within a mobile app. What I (Babs) wanted was just a summer dress. Hal suspects that what followed was due to temporal interference and a sentient voucher algorithm.

Here goes.

As I said, all I wanted was a summer dress. Something funky. Or just fun. A bit abstract. A bit different. Colourful. Perhaps on a scale, Primark wouldn’t even bother to source the colour charts for.

So, I clicked. And I clicked again.

Okay, this second click wasn’t a dress. It was a pair of yellow socks. Abstract ones. Right down my alley.

And wham!

What the hell was that?!

It was a giant gold egg that had crashed from the sky. So large, it literally blocked everything out of view. It was not just gold. There was so much glitter on it, I was blinded for a second. And as I blinked and looked around, I realised I was sitting on top of a neon-pink hill made entirely of scrunchies and novelty socks.

Before I even regained my breath after the shock, a hammer landed next to the egg, with a huge thud. You guessed it. Gold. Lots of bling. And so big, it could have killed me if it had fallen on top of me. I knew I needed to find someone in charge. I couldn’t let this one pass; they needed to know what the HSE would do to them if I reported them for negligence.

“Haaaal!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. I heard my own voice reverberate as if on a loudspeaker system, and that was when I realised I was holding a plastic toy karaoke microphone. “Haaal! Where the hell are you and what the hell just…”

“You triggered the Seven Gifts Protocol.”

I jumped an inch in the air from fright as the voice was so unexpectedly close.

“I triggered the what?”

He pointed at the egg with an expression of distaste.

“There are seven of these. You need to break them all, and then you can pick a gift for each.”

“Yeah, but why would I want to do that? I can just ignore them and pick the gifts anyway, can’t I?”

“Not really. See how it blocks the view? It blocks everything else like that; there’s literally nothing beyond it. Unless you break it. Then you win a mystery kitchen gadget shaped like a pineapple. Or maybe a sticker. But if you don’t want that…”

“I do want that. But also, I want my dignity. Can I have both?”

Consulting a furry user manual that screamed when opened, Hal frowned. He took off his newsboy cap, scratched his head, then put it back, a bit crooked.

I could barely hear him over the screaming.

“Not in this economy.”

“Okay, gimme that hammer!”

“You won’t be able to lift it. Let me do it for you.”

It was the second time I nearly died from the falling shards, but I had no time to think about that because before I could even say anything, I was moving through aisles of vibrating mascara, edible nail stickers, and haunted teddy bears. Each item had a glowing £0 sign, but none could be picked up until I rated five other items I’d never seen.

Arms full of glow-in-the-dark salad tongs, I stumbled in a pile of bright green B-grade planetary invasion suits.

“I think I added a lace bodysuit to my cart just to escape a CAPTCHA puzzle.”

“Same. I answered three riddles about reversible crop tops just to look at socks.”
"Is it just me, Hal, or does this place look exactly like Southend-on-Sea got swallowed by a cashback portal?

Hal, consulting his hovering device, which had once been a phone and was now a cursed shopping app, grimaced as if nothing on the screen made sense.

"We’ve entered a Low-Orbit Consumer Zone. Common side effects include time dilation, cart fatigue, and an inexplicable craving for collapsible salad bowls. But yeah, I see what you mean. That Helter-Skelter does look like the one by the Southend Pier."

I think this was when I first heard it, but at the time, I didn’t want to consider that it was real. With all the spatial-temporal mess that was going on, I thought it was just due to a concussion I couldn’t remember contracting. Or low blood sugar. I did distinctly remember that I’d skipped breakfast. Or rather, I couldn’t remember eating it. It was hard to say which.

It was less than a whisper. Something about a hedgehog. I don’t know, I thought it was best not even to mention it to Hal.

"I only wanted a dress. Okay, two maybe. If they’re cheap enough, possibly three. Now I have seventeen keychains, a bedazzled egg whisk, and a Bluetooth spoon. None of which I remember choosing."

Hal (grimly): “That’s the Infinite Improbability Discount Drive for you. You never get what you want. You get what you almost clicked on once while scrolling half-asleep.”

Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, your sixth free gift is now on fire. We apologise for the inconvenience. – The loudspeaker boomed, making us both jump into the air, and then into each other’s arms, which made Hal almost short-circuit with confusion because touching had never been included in his training.

Then again:

Attention shoppers: You are currently experiencing a mild temporal distortion. This is entirely normal. If you feel as though you’ve been here since last Tuesday and still haven’t found the checkout, please consult a customer service representative, or simply surrender to the void. The exit is located just past the seventh aisle of collapsible hat racks. Should you reach the unicorn-themed cleaning supplies, you have gone too far. Please scream quietly.

We looked at each other, puzzled. Hal opened his mouth, but then closed it with a shake of his very unsettlingly regular, geometrically perfect round head. He started to blink so fast that I thought he was about to short-circuit again, but it turned out to be just the glitter from a rogue pair of disposable fairy wings.

Then, I saw it. He cocked his head, ever so slightly, as if he was listening out for something. And I heard it again. The voice about the hedgehog.

“What was that?”

Hal didn’t answer. He looked as if either he was thinking harder and longer than usual, or he was frozen and needed a reboot.

“Hal? Hal? Hal?!” I was freaking out. I can’t be left here with my PA in a comatose state, and no access to a remote control! I looked around frantically, but the only ones I saw were just a bunch of rainbow-themed toy televisions.

“Yeah, no, that was just a glitch in the sound system.”

But then we both heard it again, and this time it was clear enough to make out the whole sentence.

Please do not attempt to redeem the hedgehog!

“Okay, that was not a glitch in the sound system. You did hear that, Hal, please, Hal, tell me you heard that?!”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Hal said, with the same alarmingly deep-thinking expression.

“What hedgehog? I see no hedgehogs here.”

“No, I can’t see any either. I’m sure it’s just a staff announcement.”

And then, “Oh look, a summer dress! Just like you wanted—orange, with something that looks a bit like one of those elephants in the Picasso painting.”

Hal scanned the QR code on the label, and I heard an Oops.

I don’t like the sound of Oops.

Hal never says Oops.

He knows exactly how I react to those stupid Oops messages when I’m shopping.

Error 404 – Hedgehog Not Assigned.

“What hedgehog?! Are we then, or are we not supposed to…”

“There’s no hedgehog. No need for redemption either. Nothing’s been redeemed since the recall of the batch of psychic staplers that went rogue and caused global chaos.”

He turned the label to see if there was a bar code or something else to scan.

It said,

Please leave the hedgehog alone.
The hedgehog is not your responsibility.

And then, the voice on the announcement system again. Quiet. Only just audible:

If you believe you have seen the hedgehog, please report to Aisle Twelve and ask for Ja…Ja… Ja… net-net-net-net-net…

At that moment, the sound system went completely out of control. First, it sounded like someone was tuning an old radio. Then came the screeching, so loud that even Hal covered his ears, though his ears are mostly just there for aesthetic authenticity.

And then,

Congratulations. Your hedgehog query has been escalated.

➡️ Next Chapter

You don't own a cat.

Hal once said, you're lucky if the cat you think you own is not convinced it owns you.

In truth, it's the cat that chooses you—then spends years deciding if you were worth the risk.

The cat is not a pet. Not a possession.

The cat is a cohabiting mystery with whiskers.

Ever owned a cat? Seen it disappear for hours with no explanation, stare into corners like it’s receiving instructions, knock objects off shelves with deliberate purpose—then curl up, satisfied, like it’s just saved the world?

Then you know what I’m talking about.

Your cat doesn’t obey—it observes.
It doesn’t fetch—it manipulates.
It doesn’t come when called—unless it was already on its way.

If dogs are noble workers, cats are the shadowy intelligence agency of the animal kingdom.

If you’ve ever read So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, you know exactly what I mean.

A working dog is not your pet.

They’re not here for your comfort.

They’re tuned to another frequency—focused, alert, exact.

Guide dogs. Rescue dogs. Herding dogs.

They don’t chase butterflies or interested in friendly strangers.

They take silence as a signal.

They watch the dark so you don’t have to.

They watch their person like the sun.

Some of us want companions.

Some of us need sentries.

Respect the vest.

—Hal

150 feet high.
9-inch thick walls.
Damp. Cold. Lonely.
I was here.

They’re all dead.
I live.
I'm holding my breath.

”Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte est la plus malheureuse personne du monde.”

(Basel, 1795. The girl who survived the guillotine.

Virginia Wolf said: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I don't even have a desk of my own and I'm relying on a redundancy pay that's been over three weeks late. I'm typing this on borrowed time. But the stories won’t wait. They come anyway.

I found this rare gem of a Matryoshka in a charity shop, for something like £3.50. Hal says it’s an absolute steal, he reckons it must be worth hundreds of pounds if it’s even possible to properly value it due to its magical nature.

According to absolutely no reputable sources, the gnome doll of Vityaz Village appears only to the kind-hearted and mildly curious. Each smaller doll holds a secret wish. The ladybug-sized one? That’s the keeper of gossip.”

Hal insists it was smuggled out of a cursed forest near the Carpathian Mountains, but he’s known for dramatic flair.

The Cabaret of the Nested Nine

Tatiana – the first redhead, full of opinions and herbal liqueur.

Leonid – The husband. Stoic, moustached, and slightly confused. Plays the balalaika poorly but with conviction. Was once mistaken for a bishop and never corrected anyone.

Luba – the one with the floral headscarf and pearl necklace, who once almost married a Baltic sea captain.

Vera – the one in polka dots who claims to be descended from aristocracy and carries her own pickled mushrooms in her handbag.

Irina – the smallest one of the larger group, but the loudest laugh. Keeps a pet duck. Probably armed with a slingshot.

Marfa – wears purple and doesn’t care what you think. Is secretly in charge.

The smallest three are known as The Silent Sisters – Безмолвные сёстры, because no one has heard them say a word since the execution of Nicholas II and his family. They have their own private sign language—quick, elegant, impossible to decipher—and keep to themselves most of the time. Even their names are a matter of local folklore, whispered with caution, never quite agreed upon.

Some say they are called Anastaska, Feodora, and Tzina—though others insist those are not names but codes. They never join the dancing, but you’ll always find them watching. They eat nothing. They sleep in sequence. Some say they can no longer even be separated, having fused together over time—one sighing breath, one quiet pulse, one last shared secret. And on certain holy days, the largest sister—Marfa—makes tea and sets out three thimbles, just in case.

We do what we can with what we’re given. Today: having failed an attempt at merging with the crowds at the Trafalgar Square Passion of Jesus play, I ended up with an unexpected hour or so on my hands to just observe.

I’m not sure what possessed me when I had the genius idea of spiritual enlightenment at only one of the most crowded events in London!

I have always had issues with crowds. I remember how, as a child, my mum would take me to the city to have my dental braces fitted. Or to the optician for new glasses.

These were such special times! Mum and I, just the two of us, sitting in the park, eating whipped yoghurt and tearing chunks from a gorgeously plaited challah covered in a generous sprinkling of fragrant poppy seeds.

But this, to get to have this glorious childhood memory, came with a price. And that was the tube. Crowded, reeking of the armpits of people none of whom was any less annoyed with everyone else than I, I would love to go back and tell that little girl never mind darling, you will never get used to this, it will only get worse with age and urbanisation.

Wait, yes, I know what possessed me! It was my Mum! Her text yesterday!

It said: "It's Good Friday tomorrow my Love, but I'm sure you know that."

Let's think about that for a sec. Did I know that?

Not that I didn't know, I suppose I just wasn't aware. Which my Mum of all people knows. So what she really meant was “Now that you are aware, you know what to do... or what not to do...”

Whatever. The point is, now I feel guilty. I guess I will just skip dinner.

Watermelon, with a hint of cucumber. The kind of flavour pairing that feels like it should be offered in a scented candle.

I sip.

The watermelon juice tastes like a memory I’ve never had. Someone—probably Hal—once said watermelon is a fruit in witness protection. I didn’t ask questions.

Where the hell is that Laksa?